Boris Johnson on Bombing Al-Jazeera

by Tom on November 26, 2005

As a follow-up to Chris’s post on the subject, I notice that Boris Johnson MP, the editor of The Spectator, has offered to publish the memo detailing Bush’s alleged conversation with Blair about bombing the al-Jazeera TV station. (That last link is to the Speccie’s website, which requires registration; if you can’t be bothered, Johnson’s piece is also available on his own website).

Johnson is of course a notorious self-publicist, and he may have made some shrewd calculation about the actual likelihood of his being passed the memo versus the brownie points to be had from posing as a courageous editor standing up to the government. None the less, fraternal relations between the American and British right have reached a pretty desperate state when the leading article in Britain’s most prominent conservative magazine contains the following sentences:

Outlandish and inconceivable the story certainly is, but what we really want to know is: is it true? If true, then this magazine would finally abandon its long struggle to find anything to support in US policy towards Iraq and the Middle East in general.

Shrill indeed. I doubt that Johnson would have kept his job for very long if he’d tried taking this line when that greedy crook Conrad Black owned the paper, but when the ship starts to sink, even the most polished and charming of rats has to consider an exit strategy.

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Boris made his claim on Have I Got News For You last night. It sounded to me like an off the cuff claim he wasn’t serious about (he also admitted to having tried to snort cocaine in his youth, but sneezing and blowing it all over his coke-addled friends, a la Woody Allen in “Annie Hall”), but stranger things have happened.

I should point out to American and Australian readers that while the Conservative party has backed the war in Iraq 100%, due to their dislike and distrust of Blair the Tory press (especially the non-Murdoch press like the Daily Mail) has always been a good deal sceptical of the whole venture. Media Lens pointed out a few weeks ago that the real smear job on the Lancet Study was carried out by the ‘liberal’ press: the Tory press more or less accepted it.

So viewed in that context, I suppose it is possible that the Spectator might publish such a thing, if only to get rid of the last shattered remnants of Blair’s credibility.

And also because the nationalist wing of the conservative party is beginning to realise tht it has been taken for a ride by the Americanist wing, so that all the time they were defeinding their sovereignty and liberty from “Brussels” they were handing it over, in rather larger chunks, to Washington.

He also made the offer in Thursday’s Telegraph. But I thought I read somewhere that he’s leaving the Spectator anyway, through some combination of Andrew Neil wanting a full-time editor and an expected front bench position if Cameron gets the leadership.

“that all the time they were defeinding their sovereignty and liberty from “Brussels” they were handing it over, in rather larger chunks, to Washington”

There’s a permanent majority in Britain for less (and certainly no more) integration with the EU and avoiding Wolfowitz-style adventurism in the ME, but it proves difficult to elect a government whose policies reflect either of these views.

Why on earth would Boris bravely risk prison by printing the memo when surely he could simply read it into the record in the House of Commons – all media would then be free to report the details, protected by parliamentary privilege, no?

DC, all that has to happen if he tries to read it into Hansard (what we call ‘the House of Commons record’) is for one Labour MP or Minister to move for an immediate secret session by shouting ‘I spy strangers’. The Speaker is then obliged to halt all proceedings and call for a vote. If the MPs vote for secret session, which they would unless there was a massive Labour rebellion, then nobody but MPs may listen to the debate and no record is published in Hansard.

One of my favorite memories from my days as a student in London (mid-1960s) arose during one of the routine disparagements, in the pages of The Times, over the proposal to drop the Anglo-Saxon requirement for those reading English at either Oxford or Cambridge (I forget which), on the grounds that those studying modern literature had less need of A-S than of other subjects. Amid the more or less reasoned, more or less detailed, analyses of this proposal there was one letter which read in its entirety (I quote from memory, alas):

“English literature only comes down to 1815. After that there are merely books.”

The Indy hints (albeit on precious little substance) that the ‘bomb Al-J’ headline is the tip of the iceberg, as far as the forthcoming OSA trial is concerned.

I think the ‘I am Spartacus’ approach is the best way to call Blair’s bluff here. Either that, or the Peter Wright approach. (Funny to think of the pre-Web days, when people had to buy Spycatcher in Australia…)

I don’t know which is worse, that ‘I spy strangers!’ has gone, or that I didn’t know and a kindly American had to tell me. And weren’t they supposed to wear top hats while spying strangers?

It reminds me of the Dwight MacDonald attack on the Church of England ditching the King James Bible: ‘Yes, they didn’t change ‘Jesus wept’. But I’m sure there was strong support for ‘Jesus burst into tears’…

To dc’s point 9. Because the detention of an MP at Her Majesty’s Pleasure might bring down the government, which Boris’s colleagues would be extremely grateful for.

To Dan Hardie’s point 10, that rather assumes that Labour MPs bother attending the chamber, outside of voting. There’s not much evidence of that. Remember the hunt protest? The place was virtually empty. The cameras rarely show how empty the seats are. Also, the chamber isn’t big enough to seat all 649 should they turn up at the same time. Some have to stand or sit on the steps in the really big debates.

The liberal stand against the war in Iraq was questioned in the press at the weekend. The article recalls the plot in the film ‘Three Days of the Condor’: the nation’s government thinks it must do all it can to secure supplies of finite energy for its people. In the absence of an enforceable world order, there are effectively no rules for some countries.

… rather assumes that Labour MPs bother attending the chamber, outside of voting

Adjournment debates, for instance, are typically very sparsely attended. I don’t think it’d be hard to pick a suitable moment, so long as nobody got wind of what he was planning to do. Of course, Hansard may be edited after-the-fact (so that MPs can correct their misstatements and so forth — compare, for instance, John Prescott as rendered in Hansard with his speeches as broadcast); I wonder whether (in practice) Johnson could be forced to withdraw the text from the published record?

An alternative would be to find a pliant peer to read it in the Lords; I don’t know what the rules for proceedings in camera are but it’d be harder to pass the motion for secret proceedings given there’s no Labour majority there.

Odd.. I thought it a common war strategy to take down your enemy’s command, control and communications infrastructure. I imagine there would be many benefits to denying your enemy the ability to disseminate information and propaganda electronically. And as Al Jazeera is widely perceived to have chosen to act as the “information ministry” for the fascist Islamist movement in general and Bin Laden’s network in particular. It would stand to reason that sooner or later Al Jazeera might find itself looking at a situation not unlike one that occurred in ’98. In which a satellite guided bomb from a B-2 “accidentally” found its way into the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Which, coincidentally, occurred immediately after the Americans learned that the Chinese were providing the Serb military with logistical support.

Considering what they could do if they chose to. And considering the fact that, as divided as the American public is about why they went to war, the general attitude of most of them is one of “Lets just take the leash off the military, let em do what they do best and end this thing. Then bring em home.”
Far from getting indignant at the fact the idea of bombing AJ was tossed about – I’m rather surprised at the restraint shown so far by the fact they’re still on the air.

And don’t think any concern for the opinion of Europeans or anyone else ways heavy on their decision making process. Paraphrasing here – But the attitude towards the complaining of foreigners (Europeans in particular) has been summed up for me as “Complain? Let em complain all they want. You figure the more energy they spend bitching about us – the less likely it is they’ll l fall back into their default mode of acting out their frustrations & start killing each other off in obscene numbers again.. Naaah, better to have em hate on us than us have to waste any more blood and treasure stopping anymore of their genocides.”